NomadBSD, a BSD for the Road

As regular It’s FOSS readers should know, I like diving into the world of BSDs. Recently, I came across an interesting BSD that is designed to live on a thumb drive. Let’s take a look at NomadBSD.

What is NomadBSD?

Nomadbsd Desktop

NomadBSD is different than most available BSDs. NomadBSD is a live system based on FreeBSD. It comes with automatic hardware detection and an initial config tool. NomadBSD is designed to “be used as a desktop system that works out of the box, but can also be used for data recovery, for educational purposes, or to test FreeBSD’s hardware compatibility.”

This German BSD comes with an OpenBox-based desktop with the Plank application dock. NomadBSD makes use of the DSB project. DSB stands for “Desktop Suite (for) (Free)BSD” and consists of a collection of programs designed to create a simple and working environment without needing a ton of dependencies to use one tool. DSB is created by Marcel Kaiser one of the lead devs of NomadBSD.

Just like the original BSD projects, you can contact the NomadBSD developers via a mailing list.

You can see a complete of the pre-installed applications in the MANIFEST file.

Nomadbsd Openbox Menu

Version 1.2 Released

NomadBSD recently released version 1.2 on April 21, 2019. This means that NomadBSD is now based on FreeBSD 12.0-p3. TRIM is now enabled by default. One of the biggest changes is that the initial command-line setup was replaced with a Qt graphical interface. They also added a Qt5 tool to install NomadBSD to your hard drive. A number of fixes were included to improve graphics support. They also added support for creating 32-bit images.

Installing NomadBSD

Since NomadBSD is designed to be a live system, we will need to add the BSD to a USB drive. First, you will need to download it. There are several options to choose from: 64-bit, 32-bit, or 64-bit Mac.

You will be a USB drive that has at least 4GB. The system that you are installing to should have a 1.2 GHz processor and 1GB of RAM to run NomadBSD comfortably. Both BIOS and UEFI are supported.

All of the images available for download are compressed as a .lzma file. So, once you have downloaded the file, you will need to extract the .img file. On Linux, you can use either of these commands: lzma -d nomadbsd-x.y.z.img.lzma or xzcat nomadbsd-x.y.z.img.lzma. (Be sure to replace x.y.z with the correct file name you just downloaded.)

Before we proceed, we need to find out the id of your USB drive. (Hopefully, you have inserted it by now.) I use the lsblk command to find my USB drive, which in my case is sdb. To write the image file, use this command sudo dd if=nomadbsd-x.y.z.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M conv=sync. (Again, don’t forget to correct the file name.) If you are uncomfortable using dd, you can use Etcher. If you have Windows, you will need to use 7-zip to extract the image file and Etcher or Rufus to write the image to the USB drive.

When you boot from the USB drive, you will encounter a simple config tool. Once you answer the required questions, you will be greeted with a simple Openbox desktop.

Thoughts on NomadBSD

I first discovered NomadBSD back in January when they released 1.2-RC1. At the time, I had been unable to install Project Trident on my laptop and was very frustrated with BSDs. I downloaded NomadBSD and tried it out. I initially ran into issues reaching the desktop, but RC2 fixed that issue. However, I was unable to get on the internet, even though I had an Ethernet cable plugged in. Luckily, I found the wifi manager in the menu and was able to connect to my wifi.

Overall, my experience with NomadBSD was pleasant. Once I figured out a few things, I was good to go. I hope that NomadBSD is the first of a new generation of BSDs that focus on mobility and ease of use. BSD has conquered the server world, it’s about time they figured out how to be more user-friendly.

Have you ever used NomadBSD? What is your BSD? Please let us know in the comments below.

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Very very nice distro, I tried to use it but I had some problems: fuse don’t work and I can’t browse windows partition and USB stick or external hard disk, and more: in a Lenovo ideapad 110-17ISK laptop wifi card Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 (don’t work) is without driver and system hang configuring network. If have solution, after tested a lot of system I will use it as my default system because finally I found the system I looking for, it is strong speed friendly and secure Thanks for yours effort

I tried a few but they all failed. Here is a portion of my notes… Tried GhostBSD19.04.iso… Fail! First time around I let it autoload (Multi-User option (Default)) and got a screen with two panels (one top, one bottom). However I could do nothing. Clicking on Applications, or Places, or System did nothing. Right clicking anywhere did nothing. The only thing that did work was pushing the Power button. It shut down the laptop. The second time around I tried the Single User option in the boot screen, but got the same result. So… not exactly out-of-box. Also tried FreeBSD-12.0-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso… another fail. At least this once loaded on, but on reboot I got a full screen terminal that sent my to some manual page and that was it. Nothing else. No place to type in another command and any other key I hit let out this loud ‘blip’ on the speakers. Not out-of-box. TrueOS, halfway through, the download failed – “Dowmload Failed.” On the second attempt it failed at 99%. On the third attempt it failed near the beginning. MidnightBSD, both the regular ISO version and the UEFI ISO version appeared to be unreadable from the usb drive as the testing laptop booted to the OS on the hard-drive. OpenBSD, same as MidnightBSD, laptop booted to OS on hard-drive. NomadBSD, doesn’t provide an ISO image. In order to download/install it to a flash drive you have to do this involved dance with a terminal – no thanks. Project Trident, well, I got all the way past reboot. BUT, that’s where thing got hung up. First I got all kinds of FAILS. Three that I caught were ‘dhcpcd.nfe0 and dhcpcd.wlan0’ failed; something about a ‘dumpon’ fail; and a ‘can’t find host 0.freebsd.pool.ntp.org’, and finally it deplayed ‘ath0: ath_legacy_rx_tasklet: sc_inreset_cnt > 0: skipping’ over and over and over (maybe twenty or thirty times) before I hit the power button. So, BSD is definitely not something you can just install and go to work with. It appears BSD is to Linux, what Linux was seen to be to Windows many years ago.